Partnering up for Climate Change: from Urgency to Emergency!

Katowice - CoP 24

SUNx and ECOTRANS are partnering up for Climate Change Resilience Policy Implementation in the Face of Super-national Failure

by Gordon Sillence, Ecotrans

Against the background of a Polish coal-dusted winter in Katowice, the final days of the current 25^th year version of Climate Change Conventions CoP 24 - or better name it CoP OUT 24 - , is grinding out another expensive text exposing the ostrich-like failure of nation states to confront our contemporary and escalating Crises – A short hand word that signifies an unnecessarily difficult future for us all in the best of scenarios, and the End of Days Anthropocentric human extinction by 2100 spelt out by Nasa scientist Jim Lovelock, the man who introduced the Gaia concept to us all in the 70s. 

Worst still, whilst the UN chief Antonio Gutierres wrings his hands at the lack of member state action, the words of the UN CoP 14 Conference on the Conservation of Biodiversity held in the dust bowl of Egypt and opened by former military general now President Mohammed Al Sisi are only a fortnight old, and between the two 25 year global updates on each convention, we can see the biosphere fabric from north to south, east and west, as ravaged, war-torn, depleted, urbanized, industrialised and exhausted, with whole species disappearing and 1 billion people still enduring daily conditions of poverty that all else fear. 1% sit on the deck, but we now have Dante’s inferno looming on the twilight horizon of the over-consumptive, rapacious, conflict- and competition-driven post-war pursuit of the affluent society. The 2030 countdown clock ticks each day ..

When international state agreements are lacking, then business and civil society need to make alliances with those who are aware and wanting to mitigate the impacts and adapt to global climate changes. Having followed each Convention from their Agenda 21 inception in Rio in 1992 personally, the ECOTRANS Network for the Development of Sustainable Tourism with its Tourism2030 platform is promoting its Partnership with the SUNx network signed on Earth Day 2018 to collaborate on connected country-based solutions for territorial sustainability using tourism value chains as the vector of cross-sector implementation.  In other words, go green to get ready for the worst weather you never want to see if tourism is your business, your destination or your shapes your residence. 

Every person, region and country should urgently act on the outcomes of both of these most recent CoPs – Our planners and administrators of urban and rural space need to prepare us for the high possibility of extreme weather events devastating current global supply chains and landscapes.  Every region needs to know what will keep it functional in the next decade, as every region is now - like it or not- part of the global whole.  In the three policy cycles remaining – 2022, 2026 and 2030, this partnership will work with national and local public administrations to measure, map, manage, market and monitor tourism value chains, pool climate change expertise and create a knowledge economy that has territorial traction, especially in protected areas

Former UN WTO Assistant Secretary General and SUNX co-founder Geoffrey Lipman and ECOTRANS President Herbert Hamele are clustering their respective expert networks to put this global map and service together. Other networks are invited to form a global cluster that can react in a more timely fashion to the most urgent of the issues. In this respect Civil Society’s implementation role within the public private partnership model is essential. Currently the Partnership involves collaboration on the Copernicus C3S European Tourism project, the Maurice Strong Scholarship programme and the TRIANGLE Intern system.

By creating a common Green Map of the local to Global Economy in which the SunX centres run their sustainability and resilience programmes and Ecotrans provides its Go Green Destinations and SME e-training, measurement mapping, management marketing and monitoring package. Having already created the largest 3^rd party assessed international market-place for sustainable tourism products and services (over 7,400 to date), Ecotrans is making this a legacy project to extend the networks’ 25 years of high level expertise into the next three policy cycles to ensure the SDG 2030 goals have a successful multi-stakeholder implementation process that builds on the past and is geared specifically to the Climate Action and Biodiversity and Partnership Goals.

In line with what CoP 24 nations desperately need as weather extremity takes its economic environmental and social tolls,  the Ecotrans/SunX partnership aims to support regions in their commitments and attempts to successfully implements  sustainable tourism consumption and productions supply chains and territories based on evidenced-based resilience thinking. With SDG 12  firmly in mind to shape policy, by  adopting  ICT technology and clustering with Tourism Knowledge and Innovation Community (T-KIC) processes,  countries and regions seeking to have a credible climate change strategy in place can put into practice a ten year budget ( over the last 3 policy cycles to implement the SDGs)  that is long enough to show the triple bottom line  profitability of sustainability planning and business practices.

Part of the work can  be seen on the Tourism 2030 site’s  Climate Change Topic and Green Maps section.  This work – exemplified by Travel Green Germany and the Travel Green Europe App – can be taken up by any country or region that is working on the application of sustainable development of tourism for territorial preservation in the face of the extremes of climate . The next decade will hold for us all a set of circumstances for which we must prepare if we are to turn the crisis we are in into the opportunity of a life time for all of us on this now very small and still green planet – which if you put both of the CoPs 14 and 24 together – needs a lot more if it is to be irrevocably damaged for further generations, and even broken  beyond repair within our lifetimes.